|
|
Project Overview
Closely set out to solve the mystery of local digital marketing for SMBs. By providing a bird’s eye view into social, review and promotions activity for their businesses and competitors, small businesses are armed with daily inspiration and a watch tool in the form of an intuitive, easy to use mobile app.
Perch App Home Page: http://perchapp.com/
Organisation
Team
Perry Evans | Founder & CEO
Tom Bender | Co-founder & Consulting CTO
Anke Heckhoff | VP, Customer Operations & Marketing
Darin Manica | VP, Engineering
Aaron Congleton | Senior Web Engineer
Jeff Davenport | Product Experience Director
Brian Erickson | Mobile Product Lead
Jeremy Vinding | Senior Web Engineer
Arik Walker | Web Engineer
Project Brief
Small business owners are famously short of time, and feeling overwhelmed with the changes in digital marketing and operations. And the noise and choice is about to explode! 2,491 startups (according to AngelList) aim to serve small and medium-sized businesses with new apps and solutions.
Stepping back from this situation, Closely saw the compelling need to help the SMB owner sort through the noise and find the signal that matters most to their business. By providing a personalized view of their local marketplace - collecting consumer and local competitor activity, they created the view through which a business owner can focus on the activity and services that matter most.
This is what led Perry Evans, former founding executive for Mapquest, Local Matters and Jabber to assemble a team of social, local and mapping app experts to design an app specifically for SMBs.
Perch is the first mobile app of its kind, designed to empower small businesses with an information advantage in today's competitive landscape. Perry’s team envisioned a platform that would provide merchants with a window into how neighboring businesses market and engage consumers online. The mobile app fits easily into a business owner's daily activities and is the first of its kind to deliver real-time insights without requiring expertise in social media, deal or check-in applications.
Closely engineered a platform that pulls posts from Yelp, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google+ and 100s of deal sites into a simple mobile app.
Project Need
Small businesses are masters of their own craft, not marketing or digital experts. Without expert staff, they are continually challenged to understand how they are doing, and what should demand their attention. Perch helps by collecting all the available data about their own business, and gives them a tool to follow and learn from their competitors and neighbors. It’s completely impractical to expect businesses to learn and use the tools of Facebook, Yelp, Twitter, Google+, Daily Deals/Loyalty Promotions and new products from Instagram, etc. By pulling all the activities into one streamlined view, and highlighting the results, Perch gives the business owner a place to stay in the know and begin to see the patterns and activities that drive best results. As users have adopted the product we’ve also seen use cases where businesses learn “best practices”, following businesses across the US, and adapting their ideas to their own local marketing.
User Experience
The biggest goal and challenge in creating Perch was simplification. A business does not know the Twitter, Yelp, Google+, Instagram, Foursquare and Facebook addresses of their business neighbors and competitors. So, we’ve done a lot of data aggregation, to provide a way of simply saying “this is me” and “watch these businesses.” From these search-based onboarding, the product auto creates a live everyday stream of all activities from these sources.
Then, to encourage engagement and gain maximum efficiency in product usage, we continually calibrate the activities of consumers to highlight what is popular - with the goal of teaching the user what is working. We also continually measure the SMB’s own Reach, Activity and Engagement to give them a recurring measure of their own effectiveness.
A visual Daily and Weekly Digest also gives the busy SMB owner a way to scan periodically from their email box. Push notifications can also be accepted by the business to alert them to important activities, as they happen.
Perch was awarded the Best Business App Award 2013 (SXSW Appy Awards by MediaPost) and has been featured as a must-have app by Forbes, Business Week, MediaPost, Techcrunch, ZDNet, Lodging Magazine and more.
In the past 12 months, the app has been downloaded by 80,000+ small businesses. Learn how businesses are using Perch on the company's blog: http://blog.perchapp.com/
Project Marketing
Perch is a leading user of Mobile Install Ads, across ad channels but most actively on Twitter and Facebook. Facebook recently featured Perch as a marketing success story for its innovation with Mobile Install Ad marketing: https://www.facebook.com/business/success/perch
Perch’s goal was to drive mobile app installs and build awareness of the brand with a very specific demographic: small business owners aged 23+ with a local brick-and-mortar presence in the United States. It wanted to reach business owners in the retail, food & dining, arts & entertainment and health & beauty industries.
Perch uses Facebook mobile app ads to connect with small business owners, driving 50,000 mobile app installs.
50,000 downloads of the Perch app on Facebook
3X higher install rate than email marketing channels
2X higher conversions from click to install than traditional mobile ads
10% better conversion of downloads compared to other channels
Project Privacy
The application provides opt-in control for the user regarding the smartphone location functionality and user notifications, and provides each user control on all email interactions according to Direct Marketing industry best practices. The application can be registered using Facebook'd identity API, which adheres to industry best practices, or through individual email and password registration.
Best Mobile or App Startup
This category relates to Startups working on a Mobile project or an App. The project could be for smartphones, tablet, web, game console or api apps. Startup projects need to be newly emerging, less than 5 million users and less than 3 years old.
More Details